Guild Wars 2

a) The game’s not supposed to be all about dps. At least include a heal and perfect dodges meter too.
b) You can get the numbers but can you interpet them well? Sure, a 100b warrior does more dps than a longbow ranger at 0 range. Does that mean the ranger is less useful?
c) It’s not important because there are no boss timers to beat.

It’s the little things that tick players off. For example, the harpies in the Cliffside fractal. I’ve been dillegently reporting their invulnerability/knock-down spam/stuck in combat at insane range-bugs for months now. When, after 3 months, I still get heaps of repair bills because of the same bug (which to me is gamebreaking), even the meek players get raging.

It could be that it’s not a priority because most people melee-rush through fractals these days, but when you hit them even once with a ranged attack while not on their platform, they go invulnerable while their friends start knocking you down like crazy.

Which would be bad enough on its own, except there’s a second bug that causes you to sometimes get defeated instantly when knocked off (even at full health and no downs yet).

Clearly you can see that at some point, people need to vent steam when this keeps happening to them?

Same here. I’m ready for it to be introduced so I can get it over with and focus on more fun things than the big grind.

Not gonna bother on my alts, but for my main I’ll make an exception.

Because you cannot always rely on your group to play the strategy that optimizes your personal dps. In my dungeon runs, more often than not my team actually benefits from my heals and other support because they’re not that good at perfectly excecuting every exploit they can find.

And on a sidenote, just because those professions are the most popular doesn’t mean they’re the best.

What about boon duration runes? Sure, it depends on your build, but on something like Elementalist with Sigil of Battle, it can effectively give you extra stacks might (3 in case of Battle example) which adds to your Power and Condition Damage (105 to each in example). Add to the the extra Fury/Protection/Regen/etc and I think it could actually compete with Rubies and Scholar.

The new content takes a lot of time too. Just this morning, I went to do the new dungeon and hoped to be done before noon.

First the LFG tool broke down, making it impossible for us to get a 5th player.

The next team had trouble getting past the oozes, for the simple reason that only 3 of us knew what to do and the other 2 seemed bent on sabotaging the ooze puzzle. 10 players later, we got past it.

When we got to the final boss, the holograms decided not to spawn a few times in a row.

In the end, the dungeon took us around 4 hours.

So I disagree that the current content doesn’t take much time. Given the size of the release (just a dungeon path), I’d say it takes more time compared to the grind achievements.

But don’t get me wrong, I like these achievements a lot more!

I can see your point, but I don’t understand why you’d focus completely on conjures and then complain about it being too focused around the conjures. You can also use conjures as just another part of your build, like for example the staff nuker that also brings an Ice Bow for the 4th skill. That player has the options of both his regular set and the conjure weapon, and isn’t forced into using only a small set of skills for extended periods of time.

It’s a combination of the above (combos and exageration of other professions’ abilities) and there’s also the use of Food and group buffs. You can do a LOT more damage if 2 ranger provide 25% vulnerability for you for example (raising your 5k to over 6k damage).

Also, Lava Font hits in small packets but the total damage still quite high. Eles have lots of small hits but when combined, you’d be surprised how much damage you’ve actually dealt. Skills like Rapid Fire and Hundred Blades on the other hand, combine all their hits into a single number which is obviously going to be a lot higher.

Not saying that the ele outdamage everyone else or anything, but all these things do affect your results.

haviz.1340:

ThiBash.5634:

I’m sorry, did I say somewhere that Mesmers cannot do these things?

If you didn’t imply otherwise you should practice logical reasoning.

What’s wrong with having 2 professions that can do the same thing in a different way?

Grevender.9235:

we are not here to establish what contribute does it gives, we are here to discuss if that scenario is balanced for Elementalist or not.
The answer is: no, is not balanced.

Well, I suppose that warriors need a buff then because they’re just as good at Crab Toss as any other profession and we can’t have that!

on a side note:
- stomping gives points to your server (using skills from the safety of a zerg doesn’t)

No, but setting up a group of people so they can be stomped does so indirectly.

- only with direct confrontation (1vs1 and 1vs2) you can ascertain class balance:

The game is obviously based on group play, not soloing. Dungeons are 5-man, sPvP is group vs. group (only recently did Anet add solo arenas, and only because egocentric players kept asking for it) and WvW is 99% about capping points, which apart from the sentries are balanced for groups too (and yes, I know supply camps can be soloed, but it’s obvious they’re meant for 2 or 3 players).

1v1 may be your whole world, but it’s certainly not the whole world of Guild Wars 2.

yelling “p0wn3d u n00b!!!” to unlucky folks that crossed your AoE while escaping from your zerg is not going to improve your individual skills and create a very misleading concept of “balance”.

Nobody’s arguing with that.

STRanger.5120:

You haven’t seen the hammer build, right? Because that way you’d know that there are no arcana points in there, so no buffs for attunement change, you stick to water attunement because of passive heal and damage bonuses to vulnerable opponents…

I guess it’s similar to the axe (full fire traits takes 30 points and other would be probably distributed somewhere else than arcana, because you stick to fire attunement with that build)

I didn’t have a particular build in mind when I wrote that post. For that particular hammer build, swapping attunements isn’t an option. However, the point I was trying to make is that you don’t have to focus on your conjure. You can also use it as ‘just another option’.

I knew it couldn’t be much when the title’s written in full caps…

Pathos.5132:

I think you’re getting the wrong impression of my point of discussion. I’m saying we need more synergy between skills and improvements to the cooldown system we currently have in order to promote stance dancing. I never said we have none. I said I want the level of interplay for our weapon sets to match up to D/D which I believe is the most well designed.

You may be right about me getting the wrong impression. I suppose it would have helped if you’d mentioned PvP in your opening post. Either your thread is about synergy between attunements, or it is about PvP balance. You claim the first, but it’s actually the latter.

The synergy exists already, where you initially claimed there was few to none. What you really mean to say is that the current skills don’t work very well in PvP. That’s a completely different debate.

The only pvp staff build I know of is a clerics build bunker that cant kill anything so I wont speak of staff in pvp (crossing fingers for good changes next patch). IIRC it was calculated that leaving fire is always a dps loss, the other atunements are only useful for support and control. Switching just for fury is a bad idea as many classes output much more fury to the group and in order to have that at all you need to put points into arcana, the point of this thread is to relax the need to go into this tree at all and to reward builds that use the other lines.
The one native finisher in staff is slow and can only be used in conjunction with your own fields once.

I’m not so sure I agree with leaving fire being a dps loss. When I play in a dungeon, my (synergy) chain usually consists of Meteor Shower (roughly 15k+ damage), followed by Lava Font (5k), an Ice Spike (4k), a Blinding Surge (3k) and then either Chain Lightning for 2k each, or a Static Field followed by Stoning and then back to Fire through Eruption (4k) for a blast finisher. That’s no small amount of damage, especially considering that my fireball only does around 1700 when it crits. Of course that won’t work in PvP (though it does surprisingly well in WvW), but the synergy (for PvE at least) is obvious.

As for going into fury, of course other professions provide fury. I’m not gonna switch just for the fury, it’s just a nice bonus. And finally, having points in arcana isn’t so bad for your dps when you have things like Sigil of Battle and Rune of Altruism. It doesn’t provide as much Power as the Fire traitline does, but it’s not a small amount either.

However, I realize now that you’re discussing PvP so it doesn’t really apply here.

Assyrian.4827:

ThiBash.5634:

You really think that ArenaNet, being afraid that their expansion might not sell well, decided to instead add free content to the game instead (which still costs them the same to build in terms of manpower)?

Just think about that for a second. Does your premise still make sense now?

Yes I do.
GW2 has core problems and patch after patch it is getting worst (condition damage/vertical progression) it was a better game at release.
what they are giving now is not free someone is paying for it. but how many wings and bag items they are going to buy without new players that will decrease.
instead of going for more audience they decided to keep what they have now.
what we are getting from LS has nothing to do with GW2 lore. who is going to invade the next city the green pirates from Mars.

But why do you believe it? Yes, there are gemstore items. Yes, people buy them. But there’s no reason to assume there wouldn’t be gem store sales if there were an expansion. Even World of Kittencraft, which has a monthly subscription, sells ingame vanity items for real life money.

Living Story = Expansion, only released in multiple small chunks instead of one big chunk. And it’s free.

Pathos.5132;

I mentioned the might stacking combos of s/d in my OP, I think thats one way to have skill synergy, but its not as interesting as the interplay of d/d skills. Massive burst off of instacast spells its not synergy, the spells do not affect each other. now if one spell stacked alot of vulnerability or some other on hit debuff for a short time, that would synergize with our instanukes and also give our opponents a tell for when the burst was coming, giving our nukes some counterplay.

What about the snares making possible your dragon’s tooth will hit something, or a knockdown? Or water’s chill/daze combo? The very combo you mention, vulnerability + damage, actually exists in scepter in the form of Shatterstone.

Staff is what i believe needs the most work on increasing synergy, and hopefully the incoming changes will help.

Staff has the most synergy of all ele weapons. Apart from the combo fields (fire/air/water) and finishers (earth), Ice Spike can be cast right after Meteor Shower for vulnerability, Frozen Ground/Static Field to keep them in said shower, Magnetic Aura to protect them while casting it and 10 points in Arcana means they can also get Fury while making said switch.

There’s so many combos/synergy with staff I cannot imagine why you’re not seeing it. Are you trolling?

Mbelch.9028:

That’s unfortunate to hear it would be difficult to code. I was hoping they could salvage code from both kits and weapon swapping. But I suppose I know far too little about coding.

Well, I can’t be certain without ever seeing the game’s source code of course, but to my knowlegde the bundle/weapon combination doesn’t exist ingame yet. So I doubt it will be easy. Buffing numbers and creating new skills out of combinations of effects of existing skills is far easier, relatively speaking.

EchenSketch.9142:

Lol, only truly skilled? I’ve reached rank 300 in tPvP as a Burst Ele.

Being able to play a single build doesn’t mean you know everything there is to know about the elementalist. If anything, burst builds are among the most repetitive, singleminded and unimaginitive builds out there.

haviz.1340:

Mesmers have chaos field, can provide swiftness, protection, regeneration, heal and remove conditions. They also have a lot of projectile control skills.

I’m sorry, did I say somewhere that Mesmers cannot do these things?

Define ‘strongest’ . If it’s damage, then on its own Fire is the strongest attunement. But if you mean utility, well, then they all have their own unique uses.

The same build I run everywhere: Evasive Arcana/Glyph build with staff. As for the guides, it’s more about learning how the fractals work in general than specific tricks for specific professions. Once you learn how to do the level 10 ones, the higher level versions are basically the same…only stuff hits harder and takes more damage.

Like they said, maybe they were good at dodging and had the ‘vigor on crit’ trait.

Or maybe they were just extremely skilled. Contrary to what some warriors would like us to believe, you can actually do well as an ele…

There’s absolutely no reason why you couldn’t play elementalist and deal a lot of damage. Having said that, if you wanna be lazy, it’s a lot easier to be a warrior and deal damage.

You really think that ArenaNet, being afraid that their expansion might not sell well, decided to instead add free content to the game instead (which still costs them the same to build in terms of manpower)?

Just think about that for a second. Does your premise still make sense now?

I suppose that actually not a bad idea. Coding it would likely be difficult though, and I can imagine it being hard to balance at first. But gameplaywise, this is one of the few things I’ve read for conjures that isn’t totally out there.

Aldebaran.8132:

If ele is going to have to wear cloth and lack the survival tricks of a mesmer or the health of a necro they kitten well better bring something to the table. They have good dps, but decent isn’t enough when heavier armor wearing lotso health professions also have good dps.

They have combo fields, can provide swiftness, protection and regeneration (and soothing mist), heal and remove conditions regularly on nearby allies, and have ‘larger than melee’ range and ‘bigger than melee AoE’ on their melee set (which can be quite useful at times).

Then maybe you could give Arcane skills a try. They’re much faster than signets in terms of activation, and you can burst quite well with them.

EDIT: The only downside being though, that you’d likely have to spec into Arcana for Arcana XII…

Mbelch.9028:

I know this isn’t the most conventional idea, but it actually could be easy to implement.

Consider a complete switch from the weapon conjures we have, and turn hammer, shield, bow and axe (and the GS elite) into REAL weapons which would have some type of elemental weapon skin.

To explain further, upon summoning an Elemetal Scepter, your main hand skills are gone and you’ve now got 15 charges of the elemental scepter for however many seconds.

This DOESNT lock you out of the class mechanic, it solves the ‘range’ or ‘melee’ issue suffered by D/D and Staff. It solves them while not making the class OP. It is a sacrifice to take a summon in WvW as you’re nixing a valuable cantrip or stunbreaker.

There could be an elemental weapon for all of our weapons: Staff, Scepter, Dagger and Focus. If you’re wielding S/D and you summon elemental dagger, your scepter is replaced by the dagger for the skill’s duration. The mechanic is if you’re already wielding the weapon you’re conjuring, it summons to your other hand if possible. If it isn’t possible, the conjure is wasted.

Let me know how this works out in all of your heads. It could be cool.

Regards,
Nex

It’s either way too complex, or I just don’t get what you’re saying. Are you suggesting to make conjured weapons only replaced ‘part’ of your skill bar, and leave the the others intact even when swapping attunements?

Beast Sos.1457:

Poorly written or not u need to grow up. English is my 4th language so maybe that should clarify it for u. ignorant ppl like u need to keep to themselves or learn how to converse with others.

Sorry if not everyone symphatizes with your elitist mindset…

Galtrix.7369:

Melfice.5091:

Yes, most zerker groups have trouble staying alive (especially pugs) if there is a kittened cleric prolonging every single fight while doing no more support than what a zerker guardian can do.

My goodness, so much ignorance. I give out much more support as a cleric than a zerker. Sucks for you if you decide to run as a zerker, and I build a defensive class, that means you need to change your build because you can’t survive a fight.

Ignorance? I think it’s hilarious! Tankers can actually annoy them by giving them higher repair bills while they stay alive and make them look bad. :-)

Tarinis.6054:

High survivability, excellent damage, wanted in groups all the time. Really no cons

Poor ranged damage, poor AoE abilities, poor looks and boring gameplay.

Also, I prefer to be wanted in a group because I play well, not because my profession is considered OP. To date, I cannot recall ever having been in a group that said: “let’s ditch the ele because he’s worthless”.

Shelledfade.6435:

Try 42k thousand blades, with 5k regular axe hits and 10k 4th attack hits with axe.

I’m guessing then that you only deal 4.2k damage with your hundred blades then?

Spectre.6452:

If you are using focus, you could pop obby flesh to negate the stunlock entirely. My point was, signets would not help much in this case.

Agreed. My point was that a signet build doesn’t work equally well with each weaponset. Focus seems optimal because it compensates for the lack of stunbreakers while also providing more ranged single target CC, something which signets seem to excel at.

Storm of the Ages.9076:

I’m really just looking to be a quick survivable striker to clean up. I don’t know if that changes anything.

There may be better choices for that than signets though. There’s a Scepter/Dagger spike build with Fresh Air that does something like that really well. I’m not sure what the build is, but I’m sure one of the other eles here does.

The first trait to pickup is Arcana 5. As for levelling, I found Glyph of (Lesser) Elemental very useful. The earth elementals in particular can tank extremely well (both in health and in attracting aggro), leaving you free to cast your spells.

EchenSketch.9142:

Delete and make an alt. Anet is pigeon-holing the class into a support class.

Don’t listen to him or people like him. Play what you enjoy, not what others tell you you should or shouldn’t enjoy.

They’re not bad suggestions, but for Meteor Shower, I feel your suggestion is actually something a player should do themselves. If you want, you can get protection/stability by switching to Earth midcast (with the right traits), or by using Armor of Earth or Magnetic Aura.

AndrewSX.3794:

Elementalists (but not only them, mind you) need some love, which is true.

But yes, ele forum community is overexaggerating and dramaqueening a LOT the issues.

I’d like to add to this that the chances are very high that not every profession will be played in equal numbers, even when everything is perfectly balanced.

Spectre.6452:

You don’t necessarily make it up in survivability when going signets. You are VERY prone to stunlocks/chain stuns, which will then kill you. With cantrips you have atleast a slight chance to move away.

S/F would help with that. You can use Air #3 to blind your attacker and weaken the spike, or Earth #5 as a stopgap stunbreaker.

STRanger.5120:

Simply put, you believe that making your whole weapon set unavailable to gain 5 skills and practically denying the whole class mechanic by it can be viable while it’s strong enough?

Sorry, but you’re not an Elementalist player if you think this way.

You have to be creative and use whatever you can get. It’s not a matter of OR, it’s a matter of AND. You can still use your attunement swaps to gain boons and you’re limited only in the sense that you can’t do both at the same time. You’ve still got all the options of you attunements available the moment you drop the axe.

What the conjured weapons give you is the ability to turn into a ‘insert profession name here’ for a couple of seconds.

DesertRose.2031:

I think the problem is less that attunement dancing is not rewarding enough but more that the best way to play PvE is to spam your hardest-hitting skills;

For staff PvE, that’s actually attunement dancing. If you cast your Meteor Shower, it’s very rewarding to then switch to water for an Ice Spike (fury from swap + vulnerability), then to air for Blinding Surge (another hard hit + fury extension) and then to earth (for the final 2 seconds of fury and to prepare an Eruption for the Lava Font/might stacks combo). It gives a lot of boons and most of the #2 skills hit harder and have a larger area than Fireball.

histerico.6153:

Would it really be that bad to have damage types? I mean it would bring a level of strategy to the game, and if you think about it why doesn’t a fire elemental take more damage when I throw ice/water at than when I hit it with fire.

It wouldn’t be bad per se, but it would add extra complexitiy to game balance. For example, a warrior would do the same against all bosses, but a necro would be virtually useless against Tequatl. To me, making things more complicated doesn’t neccesarily mean an improvement and this is one change I can personally live without. It just doesn’t add anythign for me funwise, but it would be one more balance headache added.

And it only makes sense for the 4 classic elements. In the aforementioned example, what would make more sense? The necro dealing more damage to undead (because he’s the master of death) or less (because he deals dar damage to them)?

Nice one! Congrats.

Shinky.1492:

in “MMOs”, yeah sure i agree with you, but you are forgetting the “RPG”, hence being called “MMORPGs”

Role playing games will always have leveling, it’s the part of “getting stronger” and the adventure etc.

It’s not an essential part of the ‘role-playing’. Otherwise it would have been called ‘level-playing’.

Egon Vidar.9125:

I had to swap from playing with my engineer who I prefer to play due to the complexity of the class, to my faceroll-everything warrior.

I need to level my mes and guardian to 80, I think..

Untrue. I could solo the boss on my staff ele (not bragging, I actually did it) so you should be fine on your engineer. The trick is to not melee hug the boss and pull the adds to IT, but vice versa. Stay near the holos, let the boss come to you while you dodge that 1 or 2 spinning gears, and when they’re both together, blow up the hologram, hit the boss a few times and run to the next one.

Once my team got the idea, we facerolled the boss instead of vice versa.

I don’t think the FGS needs any boosts. There are 4 Conjure Weapons and 1 Elite Conjure Weapon, maybe he meant only the non-elites

Cast while moving would be awesome…

Pathos.5132:

One major problem is we need more cross atunement synergy between skills to promote atunement swapping

What about combo fields & finishers? Don’t they provide enough synergy? What about scepter? Hurl→Lightning Strike gives a massive burst? Not synergy?

There’s a lot of synergy already.

STRanger.5120:

Nevertheless, Elementalist is still my main and it will remain that way, because I just love the class.

Totally agree with you on that. I’m guessing there’s just something on the warrior, some weakness, that we’re missing. ;-)

reikken.4961:

Arcane lighting is indeed pretty weak. Zephyr’s boon, however, is also pretty weak. The only auras staff can produce are eruption->frozen ground, and magnetic aura. And frozen ground is too powerful and on too long a cooldown to only use it when you can combo it with eruption, so you may not even always get that aura.

That’s true, in this build it probably wouldn’t work. I’m still running Evasive Arcana and boon duration runes, so for my build even just triggering on Magnetic Aura, Zephyr’s Boon would give me perma Fury. And of course, I have more blast finishers available in my earth dodge roll.

MyPuppy.8970:

(I agree we definitely lack a pull).

I wonder how the new Earth Shield will function. It does seem like pulling foes towards you instead of vice versa would be more appropriate for Magnetic Grasp though.

And oh I miss Shockwave, earthquaque, churning earth, aftershock from original GW.

Yeah, they were so much fun. :-)

STRanger.5120:

Ranged skill is at least 900 units long, not 600.

600 is plenty for ‘cannot be in melee because boss has some uber melee attack’.

And again, I’m not asking for weapon swap, I’m asking for compensation.

Vapor Blade, gap closers, Frost Aura, signets and conjures are ‘compensation’. You could also use S/D or D/F and get a couple more ranged skills. Unless I’m misunderstanding you, ‘compensation’ is one or two skills that help you get by until you can get back in melee. They’re not a ‘attack from 1200 range for 5 minutes’. Right?

Also, Conjures can’t made up for that due to theirs huge limitations (duration, charges) and especially frost bow is used only for its #4 skill, every other skill sucks kitten the bow…

After the change they likely will make up for it. 30 charges per 60 seconds is plenty.

LordEarle.9754:

Frostburn
This trait would cause the chilled condition applied by the elementalist to deal damage in the same way that the necromancer’s “terror” trait causes their fear condition to deal damage.

Could be interesting, but a large part of the chill on a staff ele comes from combos with their ice field. You’d have to track carefully which player applied which stack of chill and that might cause extra strain on Anet’s servers.

Also, they may save their blast finishers for freezing fields in order to obtain frost armor rather than using them on the first field that presents itself.

You can already combine them with aura traits to give players in it Fury, but I get your point.

Fan the Flames
This master trait in the fire line would cause burning applied by the elementalist to produce an aoe effect every time it ticks.

Interesting, but I’d really be more comfortable with making it grandmaster level.

Feed the Fire
This master level fire trait would cause damage inflicted by the elementalit’s burning to heal the elementalist proportional to the damage dealt.

Even at low levels of condition damage, this would heal for more than things like regeneration, signet of restoration and soothing mist. If you take into account multiple targets and if it were affected by healing power, it could outdo all of them combined. Too strong imho.

Disorienting Winds
This master level air trait would provide the elementalist with 1 second of distortion upon attuning to air (with a 10 second internal cooldown to account for fresh air).

Too strong for master imho, might be ok for Grandmaster.

LordEarle.9754:

Thunderstruck “The next time you blind an opponent, you also daze them for 1 second”.

How would this function with Blinding Surge?

Crystalize
Whenever you are struck by an attack, you gain a buff that lasts 1 second, stacks in intensity, caps at 10, and provides something along the lines of 50 condition damage and 50 toughness.

+1000 stat points would be a bit too much for any skill, given that currently they grant around +200 at most. Also, if you only get it when getting hit 10 times per second, you’ll not live to appreciate it.

Cinder.2056:

You clearly have the state of mind that every elementalist player posting issues here is inferior to you. Please stop. Those who can’t grasp the core of an elementalist has already moved on to other easier classes, rest that remained here keep hopes and intentions to improve a problematic elementalist profession.

The reason I react that way is because I’m constantly treated by other posters in the exact same way. I disagree so I’m a considered an idiot. And when after being nice and respectful for months, I finally snap and respond in kind, I get called on it.

Where were you when a certain warrior player called me a PvE loser that was too whiny to try roaming?

Can you say elementalist is not in a troubled state? Unlikely. It is the ONLY class not played in mlg after all.

My posts have obviously not been very clear (not sarcasm, but honestly) so I’ll summarize my view on the elementalist:

The elementalist is not perfectly fine in respect to some of the other professions. However, at least 50% of the posts on the elementalist forums exaggerate the problem. In many cases, there’s room for improvement on the player’s side and I don’t like asking for buffs to compensate for that. As for the damage/health gap, the issue lies more with the warriors being too strong than the elementalists being too weak. A full berserker warrior is as tough as a bunker ele and in my opinion, making warriors a bit more vulnerable would probably make their gameplay more interesting.

So to sum it up: yes we need buffs, but no, not every problem is ArenaNet’s fault. Happy now?

STRanger.5120:

oZii.2864:

Kamui.3150:

We’re not talking about closing the gap, we’re talking about when situations get bad and it’s a better idea to engage at range instead of sticking in melee. There’s no way for a D/D Ele to move to ranged combat and stay there when things get hairy.

That’s because you are using D/D. You can’t have it all. I don’t really understand what your trying to say here, when you pick D/D you do so because you don’t want ranged combat. At least I do.

Yeah, but other classes can, and that’s the problem. I don’t ask for some weapon swapping for Ele or something, just for compensation of this quite a big handicap.

I can always press a tildo on my Warr/Thief/Mesmer/Guardian and suddenly I’m ranged, can’t do that on Ele though….

In my experience, Vapor Blade is usually enough range if you really cannot be in melee. For the longer range purposes, you can use utilities to make up for the loss or use your gap finishers to close in again. If you REALLY want a longer range skillset, either Lava Axe or Frost Bow will work (especially with the upcoming buffs).

The ‘other profession have it’ argument is only half-valid, because eles don’t have heavy armor, stealth or controllable pets either. You could argue that the engineer is in a slightly better state because their rifle is essentially a melee weapon with a long range auto attack. Maybe Vapor Blade’s range could be extended slightly (perhaps through a trait)?

I’ve been harassed about it before, but I simply don’t find range all that important on an ele. I never feel weak in melee with my staff and the only times I’ve had problems with range on D/D was in the EB jumping puzzle.

It really depends on ‘how’ you intend to support your team.

For example, the Guardian does so though Aegis and buffing those close to them, making them perfect for melee and/or stacking groups. The Elementalist has some of that as well, but they also boost their allies through their combo fields (making attacks cause chill when fired through an Ice Field for example, burning or might in a Fire Field, or make them heal when used in a Water Field). The Ranger on the other hand, can buff all allies through their spirits at longer ranges, but their buffs have a chance to activate instead of always. And mesmers can spread boons/conditions through their staff attacks, clones and chaos fields, but being random chance you never know what you’re gonna get exactly, just that it’s useful. Thieves can support with blinds and stealth. Engineers have a whole range of different abilities. Warriors have their banners and shouts.

It’s true that all professions can support to some extent. The real question is how you wanna support them.